Incursion League – two months down, one to go

I’m still busy playing Path of Exile’s Incursion League, though I have slowed down somewhat. EVE Online’s Alliance Tournament has taken up chunks of my gaming time, and since it’s been over 30° Celsius in our flat for the last two weeks straight I didn’t feel like turning on the PC at all on some evenings.

My character’s at level 86 now. She could’ve been higher, but I died some stupid deaths costing 10% XP each. I think I can still reach level 90 before the league ends, which would tick off another challenge.

Speaking of which, I now have completed 13 challenges total, only two more than at the end of June.

I have to admit that I didn’t actively work towards completing them though. The fact that I won’t come even close to the 36 needed for the portal effect dampens my motivation pretty severely after all. The only one I’m really trying to get is ‘upgrade all temple rooms to level three’, but as there’s a good bit of RNG involved in which rooms and how many shots at upgrading them you get it’s not completely in my hands.

I absolutely demolished the House of the Others. The Others weren’t pleased!

I have to say that I’m very much looking forward to switching the build to The Baron by now, because my long time summoner build’s weaknesses start to show more and more as I try to become quicker and more efficient at clearing maps.

It’s mainly two things that make my build somewhat bulky and slow to play: my robe’s drawback and the fact that I have to cast too many things before the damage gets seriously rolling.

In order to maximize my damage output I have to cast 3x Spell Totem, 1x Desecrate, 1x Flesh Offering, 1x Vulnerability and up to 9x Summon Skeletons. Once I’m going really fast I can scratch Desecrate off that list because I always have enough monster corpses to refresh Flesh Offering then, but it’s still too much and takes too long. This is only exacerbated by the fact that a random curse is cast on myself everytime one of my totems vanishes, because one of those curses is Temporal Chains which slows my move and cast speed down considerably. Since I have to place new totems very often if I want to move fast this happens all the fricking time. I can dispell curses by using my mana flask, but it’s still very annoying.

After the switch the list will shrink to 4x Summon Skeletons (summoning three skeletons with each cast instead of just one), 1x Desecrate (probably unnecessary since some monsters should have already died by then), 1x Flesh Offering and 1x Vulnerability. Since Summon Skeletons has a very short cast time this should result in a much faster flow overall.

That being said, I still plan to play the character as is until the league has ended and we all get a free passive tree respec. I’d have to use too many Orbs of Regret to change the character now, and it’s not like she’s not playable in her current state.

I’ve given her a new look though. One of the best looking MTX armor sets was on sale recently, and I just couldn’t resist.

The cat’s still unimpressed though, as is her wont